Let me try. >“Good is the object of desire… Beauty, on the other hand, is the object of cognitive power, for we call beautiful things which give pleasure when they are seen; thus beauty rests on proper proportion, because the senses delight in things with proper proportion as being similar to themselves; for the sense and all cognitive power is a kind of reason, and because cognition takes place by means of assimilation, and assimilation pertains to form, beauty properly belongs to the concepts of formal cause.” [Summa Theologiae, I q. 5 a 4 ad.1] Fundamentally, the essence of God (the beatific vision) differentiates for mankind into the transcendental possibilities of man's essential parts: the intellect, the senses, and the spirit, corresponding with **truth, beauty, and goodness** (respectively) which are the transcendent ends of their corresponding parts (together which synthesize the beatific vision). Further, the transcendental called *beauty* subdivides into 3 objective sensibles (with further differentiation as the result of subjective *taste*). Objective beauty is the result of **integrity, clarity, and composition (or proportion)**, where integrity itself implies the very wholeness of the thing (tying beauty to man's beatific vision, which is a synthesis of the intellect, the senses, and the spirit). So the perception of God is also connected to the objective perception of beauty by the property of integration - that is, missing nothing which is essential to the whole. Clarity refers to the property that an object's Form communicates the fullness (clearly) of the object's essence - without obfuscation or concealment. Lastly, proportion seems fairly clear. There are some very ethically and politically complex things happening with the story about this model. First, it must be clear that there are *two senses* (pertaining only to aesthetics) in which we tend to use the term 'beautiful'. On the one hand, beauty is an **either-or state**. The clearest way for a person to intuitively see this is to consider what they have meant in the past when they've said 'it was a turn-off'. Suppose you were on a date with this woman. Prior to her smiling, you are very attracted to her, however, after she smiles her mouth acts as a turn-off. It's something about which we often feel guilt. Why, after all, should one thing alone flip the switch of attraction? This is the sense in which beauty is an either-or state of being. There is a second sense in which beauty is measured by degree. Apart from this woman's mouth, her other attributes are beautiful. I want to call the combination of these two senses of beauty something like the digital-analog duality of judgment. The analog corresponds with the 'hierarchy' that Jordan Peterson has popularized. Rather than judging something as either 'on' or 'off', human beings have a special faculty for being able to place something along a spectrum between 'good and evil'. This is ethically relevant, because without this analog judgment, society would be too punishing to survive. But, the other side of that same token is this: society *must* also realize and appreciate the digital judgement, which corresponds with absolute beauty and absolute ugliness - a posteriori conditions for perception that are subject to change. Hence, the hierarchy as a sort of evolving game, and which generally entails movement away from the bad toward the good. This fact underlies the point Peace has made in the past having to do with the accidental nature of Evil - there is nothing which, at bottom, moves toward the bad according to its fundamental goal. Even the most depraved Satanist is loyal to what they are because of what they perceive to be good, which is to say they pursue acceptance, power, overcoming, love, or what have you. So, a society requires this dynamic sort of duality: it must hold together both the digital judgment and the analog judgment, both the ultimate and the degrees between them. This is where things become political. It is the job of society's institutions (broadly, systems for decision making) to be sufficiently robust, and yet carefully calibrated, to pick out the digital end-point corresponding with The Good. For example, it is not just that a high-profile art gallery picks out good art. As part of the group-level computation, we think the gallery picks out *the best* art. If we imagine our analog spectrum, and designate the 50% occurring above the mean value to represent goodness generally, it is not enough that the gallery should pick out things from that half, which are simply good. Its function is to essentially identify and communicate *the ideal*. We've established that this is a necessary function of society. So many things in our everyday lives rely on analog judgment, say, our choices about romantic partners, just because they are so multi-faceted that they involve a complex negotiation among many values (this is so complex we hardly understand it). **It is just because of this everyday complexity that we require functions in society to coarse-grain things into fundamental factors**, or ideals. That means when we go to an art gallery, or when we open a magazine that features fashion models, we don't expect to find a complex decision involving many spectrums of value - rather, we expect to find a very simple ideal on display: the digital endpoint of the good side for physical beauty. This always involves disagreement within society (hence, the game), but for the disagreement to be *productive and manageable*, which is to say that it is cooperative disagreement representing a net positive for the life of a civilization, the individual deciding units (people) must *share the same values*. To see how delicate and political this process is, it takes only realizing that someone who wished to subvert (via critique) the regular value hierarchy need *not substitute the opposite digital endpoint*. In place of the female model which is unanimously deemed beautiful, a revolutionary critic does not need to insert the ugliest woman on earth. **All that is necessary is a movement toward the middle**. This *is* the moral landscape. The moment that, instead of the zenith, you begin to replace it with varying degrees of mediocrity, you've created a new dialectic. But why does this work? Because it operates on the basis of insecurity, and the minuteness of changes by small degrees. If someone had replaced the models in a magazine with horrendous looking people, there would be no tension. The group-level response would simply recognize it as ugliness, or perhaps even as a grossly political statement of the *contrarian variety*. The key to see here is that any binary lives so long as what we find is sufficiently close to the endpoints - tension arises where something does not self-segregate to either endpoint. This reminded me of the musical duo Die Antwoord, who promote an aesthetic based around ugliness as a statement in itself. Nobody would accuse this band of anything other than art. It wouldn't be seen as a real attempt to revolutionize society, because the aesthetic is far enough to one side to preserve the binary. The insidiousness of dialectical change of the subversive variety comes from the subtlety of moving the goalposts by small increments. What if instead of replacing the magazine models with horrendously ugly people, we began to replace them with people who are generally good looking, but with flaws, such as the woman in this article? Now, for anyone to issue a digital kind of judgment (in order to defend their society's absolute aesthetic ideals), would mean to deride something that is outwardly still very good. What kind of effect will this have on the members of society? It will invoke insecure responses. After all, if this otherwise beautiful woman (having only the flaw of bad teeth) *cannot be beautiful*, what stakes does that create for *most of society's women*? The 99.99999% of women will recognize they too have flaws, and the attack on this new model becomes a kind of absolutist and supremacist statement of unrealistic expectations, creating waves of insecure indignation within the group. After all, *why should the former woman be the standard of beauty*? She doesn't represent *most of us*! Thus, the move toward equity. We should see equity for what it is: the society's middle wanting 'due equity' in the representation of the society's absolute digital ideals. Now, instead of ideals representing the endpoints (and outliers), we can discourage all positive movement and change in a society by merely stipulating that *what you are already, is the ideal*, and by confusing the regular direction of motion along the analog path. Now it has begun that the function of a society's ideals is chipped away, incrementally, by this dialectic. It also helps to explain why so much of the critique that we see (of this aesthetic kind) has to do with women in society. Men are extremely adapted (largely due to what I consider an unconscious sort of race memory) to hierarchy. Men have always been measured by hierarchy, and they understand the value of the digital endpoints. This is the very reason for men to have *heroes*. Men are constantly aware of their location in a hierarchy, and have had to become adapted to coping, and taking measures to improve their lot to the best of their abilities. Women, on the other hand, have always been protected from this coarse-graining aspect of social nature. They are married to a man, and they are protected and provided for, partially by creating the safe space of the domicile itself. However, now that women have largely shunned this kind of protection (indeed they are eagerly trying to escape it to enter the grinder of the male world!), we see that their tendency with respect to the value-hierarchy is the *opposite* of the male response. Rather than to worship the great, women are vulnerable to the aforementioned dialectic, which moves the ideal toward the center. Given sufficient time and momentum (and resources), a critical movement to reposition the digital endpoint of The Good, can result in a total inversion of the value. One example that comes to mind is the family unit, and child rearing. Once considered vital and beautiful, its opposite end of the spectrum (free sex outside of wedlock, no marriage, no children) is fast becoming a value in the modern society, representing a successful inversion of the digital categories. The example in the posted article about the African model is a paradigm example of this dialectic. It picks out the category of *model*, a category meant to define *the ideal*. It substitutes degrees of lesser beauty in for the absolute. At the same time, it speaks to the harshness of making a society's ideals unrealistic perfection, simultaneously creating a victim out of the African model, onto whom all women can project their own insecurities, and in so rebelling against society's ideals, convince themselves that they are doing it **on behalf of this poor model** (instead of projecting their own self-interest in the revolution). @PS @KingOfWhiteAmerica